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This week we mourn the passing and celebrate the achievements of James M. Buchanan. There have already been many moving and informative tributes. Alex Tabarrok offers a nice summary here. I was fortunate to take one of the last classes Buchanan taught. Even though he was well into his eighties, I found him to be sharp, enthusiastic, and more than a little intimidating to this graduate student.

I’m sure people will be debating Buchanan’s contributions and legacy for quite some time. One aspect that seems unsettled is the degree to which Buchanan’s legacy is optimistic or fatalistic. An old exchange I had with Matt Yglesias highlights the optimism I found in Buchanan’s work:

The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so.

In a post responding to Matt, I made the case that public choice is no more fatalistic about government failure than other branches of econ are fatalistic about market failure:

Consider a problem from normal economics: the tragedy of the commons. Armed with empirical and theoretical reasons to expect that fishermen will over-fish a common pool, we should plan accordingly. We should examine the incentives of fishermen and think of ways to improve or alter these incentives (e.g., assign property rights over the pool, or impose a Pigouvian tax). To my knowledge, few if any economists would council that we ought to spend our time begging fisherman to pretty please stop overfishing. That is likely to be a fool’s errand.

The idea is much the same with public choice. Armed with empirical and theoretical reasons to think that politicians might do bad things, we should plan accordingly by placing some things—such as the establishment of religion—beyond the reach of politicians. I suppose we could ask Congress to pretty please not establish a religion but in my view it is better to make it illegal for them to do so.

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and the other founders of Public Choice and its close-cousin Constitutional Political Economy didn’t stop their analysis after they found that politicians sometimes behave badly. Like James Madison before them, they thought of constructive ways to make political actors behave better, sometimes by placing certain decisions beyond their reach.

You can think of the project as having two goals. One goal would be to clarify for conservatives the distinction between being pro-market and being pro-business. I think that some progress toward this goal is possible.

The other goal would be to persuade liberals that deregulation can be a way to reduce the power of big business. On that goal, I am much less optimistic. You can talk all day about regulatory capture and how big government serves entrenched interests. And what the liberals will come back to you with is, “Yes, that is why we need campaign finance reform and to elect politicians who believe in stronger regulation.”….

I picture liberals as having an unshakable belief in the power of moral authority. That is, if you exert enough moral authority, you can overcome any problem. Or, to put it in negative terms, if any problem exists, it is because not enough moral authority has been exerted to try and solve it.

A post by Matt Yglesias from last October would seem to support Arnold’s claim that liberals are unlikely to be persuaded:

The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so. You want politicians and civil servants to feel worse, not better about behaving cynically.

Call me naive, but I still think that some liberals are open-minded enough to be receptive to the public choice view. Why? Because many liberals don’t apply moral-authority arguments when they talk about conventional economic problems. There, like others, they think about incentives.

When a liberal (or at least a liberal economist) sees a tragedy of the commons, he doesn’t waste his time begging fishermen to pretty please stop overfishing. Instead, he plans accordingly. He thinks about the incentives that these fishermen face and comes up with solutions (for example, Pigouvian taxes or the assignment of property rights). As I wrote back in October:

The idea is much the same with public choice. Armed with empirical and theoretical reasons to think that politicians might do bad things, we should plan accordingly by placing some things—such as the establishment of religion—beyond the reach of politicians. I suppose we could ask Congress to pretty please not establish a religion but in my view it is better to make it illegal for them to do so.

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and the other founders of Public Choice and its close-cousin Constitutional Political Economy didn’t stop their analysis after they found that politicians sometimes behave badly. Like James Madison before them, they thought of constructive ways to make political actors behave better, sometimes by placing certain decisions beyond their reach.

There is nothing fatalistic about that.

When it comes to government-granted privileges to entrenched interests, we shouldn’t wring our hands and beg governments to pretty-please stop pandering to the wealthy and well-connected. We should plan accordingly. We should think of the incentives of politicians and come up with institutional solutions (for example, by forbidding politicians from handing out particular favors to particular firms or industries). If there are liberals who understand the power of incentives when it comes to microeconomics, I believe there are liberals who will understand the power of incentives when it comes to special interest politics.

There’s one more reason to be optimistic. My colleague Adam Thierer has assembled an interesting compendium of expert opinions on regulatory capture. The quotes show experts interested in grappling with incentives, not lecturing on the basis of moral authority. It is telling how many of the experts are more-naturally categorized as left-of-center than right-of-center.

The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so. You want politicians and civil servants to feel worse, not better about behaving cynically.

Unlike Matt, I think he is sufficiently open-minded to update his prior beliefs, so here is my attempt to help him ‘get’ it. In my view, public choice does not exhort politicians to feel better about behaving badly. It just exhorts us to expect them to behave badly in certain circumstances and to plan accordingly (often by changing their incentives). In this regard it really isn’t all that different from normal economics (a point raised by one of Matt’s commenters, my friend Michael Makowsky).

Consider a problem from normal economics: the tragedy of the commons. Armed with empirical and theoretical reasons to expect that fishermen will over-fish a common pool, we should plan accordingly. We should examine the incentives of fishermen and think of ways to improve or alter these incentives (e.g., assign property rights over the pool, or impose a Pigouvian tax). To my knowledge, few if any economists would council that we ought to spend our time begging fisherman to pretty please stop overfishing. That is likely to be a fool’s errand.

The idea is much the same with public choice. Armed with empirical and theoretical reasons to think that politicians might do bad things, we should plan accordingly by placing some things—such as the establishment of religion—beyond the reach of politicians. I suppose we could ask Congress to pretty please not establish a religion but in my view it is better to make it illegal for them to do so.

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and the other founders of Public Choice and its close-cousin Constitutional Political Economy didn’t stop their analysis after they found that politicians sometimes behave badly. Like James Madison before them, they thought of constructive ways to make political actors behave better, sometimes by placing certain decisions beyond their reach.